Iraq’s Factions Agree to Form Security Council

Iraqi officials agreed Sunday to set up a council that would give each of the country’s main political factions a voice in making security and economic policies for a new government.

The accord, announced after nearly a week of negotiations, was aimed at deflating rising sectarian tensions and represented the first breakthrough in the U.S.-guided effort to form a unity government after parliamentary elections Dec. 15.

President Bush applauded the deal, which came as the third anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion focused public attention on the troubled effort to stabilize Iraq and start bringing home 133,000 troops after toppling President Saddam Hussein.

“I encourage the Iraqi leaders to continue to work hard to get this government up and running,” Bush told reporters in Washington.

The 19-member national security council would include the Iraqi president and prime minister and hold more power than the Cabinet, which is yet to be formed. It is expected to set policies governing the army and police, the counter-insurgency campaign in Sunni Muslim Arab areas and the disarmament of Shiite Muslim militias accused of sectarian killings.

The council also will oversee economic matters such as the budget and the allocation of oil revenues.

As outlined by participants in the talks, the council would represent political parties in rough proportion to their electoral strength -- with nine members from the Shiite alliance that fell just short of a majority in the 275-member parliament, four each from the Kurdish and Sunni blocs, and two from secular parties.

Leaders of those factions took the unusual step of agreeing to form the council before what was expected to be a more contentious discussion of who would hold the positions of president and prime minister and head the Cabinet ministries controlling the army and police.

A council with powers beyond those of the Cabinet is not mentioned in the constitution ratified by voters in October. It was proposed in January by Kurdish leaders to check the power of the Shiite alliance, which is entitled to nominate the prime minister and is expected to dominate the Cabinet.

Shiite negotiators had resisted the idea of a broad policymaking council as unconstitutional. But other political blocs contended that it would help stem Iraq’s sectarian bloodshed and avert all-out civil war; they won quiet backing for the proposal from U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, who has been deeply involved in the talks from the start.

“We think that the salvation of Iraq at this time lies in showing a lot of flexibility in establishing new political bodies that include all the components of the Iraqi people,” Tariq Hashemi, leader of the main Sunni party, said Sunday at a news conference.

At least 34 Iraqis were killed or found dead Sunday in the continuing violence, which has soared since the Feb. 22 bombing of a Shiite shrine in the predominantly Sunni city of Samarra. Worried that the power vacuum was fostering the violence, interim President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, summoned political leaders last week to try to speed up efforts to form a government. Iraq has been run for nearly 11 months by an interim leadership formed from the transitional assembly elected in January 2005.

After the December election left no party with a parliamentary majority, all factions agreed, under U.S. pressure, to work toward a broadly representative government -- one that might undermine the insurgency by including Sunnis in the Cabinet.

But the effort got bogged down a month ago after the Shiite bloc nominated interim Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari, a religious conservative with close ties to Iran’s theocratic leadership, to continue in his post for a full four-year term.

The other political groups, supported by the more secular Talabani, pledged to block Jafari’s ratification, which requires a two-thirds vote in the parliament. The rival blocs have demanded that the Shiites offer a less divisive candidate, but the Shiites have balked.

In an effort to break the deadlock, Talabani last week shifted the focus of the talks to the proposed council.

Shiite negotiators succeeded in limiting some of the council’s proposed authority. Its policies will require approval by 13 members, allowing the nine Shiite members a chance to thwart any decision if they stick together.

Hussein Shahristani, a Shiite negotiator, said leaders agreed that the council’s decisions on the Cabinet would be binding “as long as they do not contradict the constitutional prerogatives of the president or prime minister.” That formula, other politicians countered, might lead to conflicts.

“In reality, the authority of the council is uncertain,” said Dhafir Ani, a spokesman for the main Sunni bloc. “It hasn’t been settled.”

Iraqi politicians said the formation of the council in effect added ground rules to replace the ad hoc manner in which decisions had been made in the last year, when party leaders brokered deals behind closed doors and presented them to the parliament. This time, Sunni parties would be better represented.

As political leaders wrangled in Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone, violence continued outside. Iraqi sources and Western news agencies reported the discovery Sunday of 17 bodies of men tortured or shot to death in Baghdad alone, 11 of them flushed by city sewers into the tanks of water-purification plants.

Police said three civilians were killed in crossfire when insurgents attacked U.S. and Iraqi forces guarding the provincial governor’s office in Ramadi, a Sunni city 60 miles west of Baghdad.

Other deaths included civilians and Iraqi policemen killed in Mosul, Baqubah, Basra and Baghdad.

In Duluiya, a Sunni town about 55 miles north of the capital, Iraqi officials said American troops killed a teacher, his wife, their 13-year-old son and four other people during clashes set off before dawn by a rocket-propelled grenade ambush on their armored patrol.

Maj. Tim Keefe, a U.S. military spokesman, contested the account from police officials and the deputy governor, saying the 3rd Heavy Brigade Combat Team of the 4th Infantry Division had killed seven “attacking terrorists.”

Keefe said two U.S. soldiers were wounded in the clash, which occurred south of Samarra. More than 1,500 airborne U.S. and Iraqi troops staged a fourth day of raids in suspected insurgent bases north of Samarra, but the patrol in Duluiya was not part of that operation, Keefe said.

Police officials said the teacher and his family were shot when American soldiers raided their home after the ambush. An 18-year-old boy from another family was killed after he left home “to see what was going on,” according to a Reuters reporter in the town.

Deputy Gov. Abdullah Hussein said in a telephone interview from Tikrit that two of the seven killed were insurgents.

After the clash, Reuters reported, American troops handed out leaflets saying they did not regard Sunnis as their enemy and wanted to withdraw from Iraq as soon as the country’s newly formed government and army were able to stand on their own.

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Times staff writers Zainab Hussein and Raheem Salman and special correspondent Asmaa Waguih contributed to this report.